Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:56 pm on 5 July 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:56, 5 July 2022

Here is my position, Llywydd, and here's the position of the Welsh Government: we are in favour of the closest possible frictionless trade with the European Union. The idea that you can simply pop back into the single market or the customs union is fanciful. We may wish that we could, but we simply can't. We are no longer members of the European Union. The conditions in which we could do that simply do not exist.

The well has been poisoned in the relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union, and continues to be poisoned by the fact that we have a Government that's prepared to breach international law and to override the agreements it itself signed up to and commended to people as a deal that they should vote for in a general election. The notion that you could simply rejoin something that has moved on, and where the invitation to rejoin does not exist, is not the basis for a sensible policy.

What Keir Starmer set out yesterday, Llywydd, was a different approach in which a Labour Government will renegotiate a very different relationship with our nearest and most important trading partners; a relationship based on respect—respect that is so sorely missing in the way that the current Government treats those partners—and a relationship that will achieve the closest possible frictionless trade for businesses across the United Kingdom and here in Wales. That is a realistic possibility.

The idea that, in a debating society sense, we should say that we should rejoin something that's no longer available for us to join does not seem to me to be the sort of policy that would actually make the difference we'd like to make.